Thursday, May 5, 2016

DARK AS DEATH

I flipped
off my flashlight to utter darkness. Not dark as in “a dark and stormy night”
but dark as in buried alive dark. No sense of front or back or up or down
except a vaguely directed gravity. My eyes, seeking a glimmer of light, tried to
adjust but nothing changed. No hint of the hand in front of my face.I leaned into
my backpack cushioning a jagged wall of the long-closed mine and listened.
Somewhere water dripped. A moan echoed from the tunnel’s abandoned timbers straining
under the weight of the world above. A falling rock clattered. I was alone
in the middle of the night nearly a quarter-mile below ground, evidence of cave-ins
all around, and not a soul knew where I was. The copper mine I was exploring
had been abandoned for more than 30 years.If something
happened, how long before anyone found me? Would time have meaning where there
is no light? The dread was unbearable and I turned my light back on.Far above, my
bicycle hidden in the bushes, it was nearing midnight, which this far north in
summer was just two hours past sunset. I had ridden 20 miles from my college
dorm room in town. Then, waiting for dusk so I could sneak across an open field
past the “Keep Out - No Trespassing” signs, I lifted rotted boards capping the
mine shaft and dropped out of sight. After descending the first few hundred
feet, I paused to catch my breath, relieved that I wasn’t going to get caught. I
was alone. Really, really alone.All to find a
rare but worthless rock found in this mine on a remote reach of Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula. Arching off the “U.P.” is the Keweenaw Peninsula, jutting like
a stony finger 75 miles into Lake Superior. Here, hundreds of mines once were
bored thousands of feet deep chasing copper-bearing ores. But only in this one
spot did a peculiar assemblage of billion-year-old rocks have just the right
combination of chemicals – primarily copper, zinc, and arsenic – that were mixed
over eons to form the heavy, metallic blue-silver mineral, mohawkite. A rock
found nowhere else on Earth but here in its namesake Mohawk Mine.When you
hold a piece of mohawkite in your hand, the weight is what you notice first.
It’s heavy like lead. Yet if dropped, it shatters like ice. Its color is not leaden
gray but sparkles silvery across a rough surface. Where exposed to air, it weathers
to blotches of color– unique compounds in shades from tea green to turquoise.
What
circuitous paths carry us from here to there. I wouldn’t have been underground
if I hadn’t decided to go to college at Michigan Tech, located in Houghton on
the Keweenaw Peninsula. I was 19 and majoring in geological engineering. The
school was 500 miles from my depressing hometown of Flint and the farthest I
could get away and still pay in-state tuition. It’s not that I wanted to be a geologist
or an engineer. I didn’t. It’s just that I couldn’t think of anything better to
do. And I kind of liked rocks.To get a
general idea of where in the mine’s miles of tunnels I most likely would find
mohawkite I had studied yellowing mine maps in musty file drawers at the college
library. It appeared that the mine’s 11th and 12th “levels”
were richest in mohawkite. A level is a
horizontal tunnel extending from the mine’s shaft. In the Mohawk Mine, every
hundred feet deeper a new level was blasted out in two directions following the
erratic seams of copper ore. Where a level interrupted a quality copper deposit,
it might open into room-sized excavations, even breaking through into the next
level above.The mine’s shafts
(there once were six, the first dug in 1899) are 8 feet wide and 18 feet tall,
penetrating the earth at a 54-degree incline, matching the dip of the
ore-bearing seam. At that steep angle I could just barely clamber down the shaft’s
jumble of rocks, maneuvering hand-over-hand while holding my flashlight, all
the while trying not to bang my bare head on broken timbers. In some places I was
able to clutch the rusted iron rails that remained, once used to ferry miners up
and down and hoist out millions of pounds of copper ore.For the few
decades it lasted, the Mohawk Mine made more than $15 million in profits and
employed more than a thousand workers. Dirty, dangerous, unhealthy work, to be sure,
but compared to what? How else could you make a living in the early 1900s in
the U.P. wilderness where winter can bury you in 300 inches of snow?I slowly
descended the mine’s shaft, keeping count until I reached the 11th
level. All the U.P.’s old copper mines are shut down now, like this mine since
1932, and slowly filling with groundwater. It was said by my fellow geology
students, who had talked to people who supposedly knew whereof they spoke, that
the Mohawk Mine, which went down nearly 3,000 feet, was flooded with water at
about 1,500 feet. I was still a few hundred feet above that so drowning was the
least of my worries. Just to be sure, I threw a rock as far as I could down
into the dark mine shaft. It flew for a long time, then bounced and rattled
into the void. No splash.I explored a
few hundred feet of the tunnels. Despite my flashlight’s anemic beam, there it
was, silvery traces of mohawkite glittering in the reflected light. Some was
exposed on a tunnel wall, once blasted by dynamite, flat as a tombstone, and impossible
to fracture with a hand pick. Other mohawkite-laden rock glistened in veins from
lips of broken ledges, fallen rock, or discarded mining rubble. I couldn’t imagine
spending my working life entombed in this rock crypt. Men once lived and died
here. Blasting and cursing filled the air. Now all was silent. As I chipped and
banged away with my rock hammer, filling my flimsy Boy Scout backpack with the
best chunks and slivers until it strained at the seams, the echoes felt creepy.
Like I was alerting spirits that I was there and up to no good. Old cave-ins sealed
access to some of the tunnels, chilling reminders that the slightest thing
could trigger a pent-up cave-in. That’s when I
rested, sitting on broken rock, and turned off my flashlight to save the
batteries. That’s when the world turned dark as death. I jumped as if shocked
when a cold drop of water landed on my bare neck. The air I sucked in tasted
old, dank, and stale. What the hell am I
doing down here?Certainly,
getting a bag of mohawkite was one reason. But how many rocks are enough? I made
that perilous trip back down into the mine twice more, exploring other levels,
collecting more rocks. Each trip, I would struggle back to the surface, canvas pack
straps biting my shoulders and pedal down US-41 in the dark to my college dorm
with 25 or so pounds of rocks poking into my back. It’s not
like I could brag about my stunts; that would have gotten me expelled from
college (and drafted: Good Morning,
Vietnam!). I don’t know. Why do we do anything when we’re young and trying
to figure out how to grow up? Earlier that
year of my mining adventures I had gone steelhead fishing on a remote U.P.
river. I had to slog through several feet of snow drifts to reach the river bank.
The sun was out and thawing chunks of ice raced by in the current. At the mouth
of the river where it plunged into Lake Superior, I watched the flow disappear
under a sheet of unbroken ice. Far offshore and barely visible was the end of
the ice and open water of the world’s largest lake. I leaned my
fishing rod against a leafless shrub and, still in my chest waders, struck out alone. A
half-mile later I was standing on the very edge of the two-feet-thick ice shelf. At
my toes stretched 50 miles of empty water. Small waves lapped the ice, their
irregular splashes the only sound. Wind from the U.P. wilds blew against my
back and it dawned on me that if an ice floe broke off with me on it, I would
die an ugly death.I found no epiphany
that day on the edge of Lake Superior’s ice sheet. Just relief at surviving. Like
after going down in that mine. Doing it for the thrill.Was it
really that simple? Or might it have had something to do with the crushing insecurities
of youth? Courting danger to compensate for fears about a terrifying future? Burdened
with still having something to prove.Like so much
that we accumulate over the years, most of those hard-earned rocks of mohawkite
became dead weight and got buried in a hole along the way. Yet not all. A few
chunks sit on shelves in my house today. They’ve been wrapped, packed, and
unbundled in a lifetime of moves from here to there. Their original burnish of
blue‑silver is dulled with tarnish. But every now and then, I’ll chip a corner
off one to see again that fresh sparkle of raw mohawkite. Its naked glint will
carry me back to adventures of my youth, alone in the depths with nothing but a
cheap flashlight, and all life’s terrors and wonders luring me ever deeper,
curious, driven to check out just one more level.

1 comment:

i was right there with you in the tunnel. It scared the crap out of me. I have been in a cave when there were no lights and you can't see your hand in front of your face. That alone is bad enough, but all the rest of is- eeeek.